Book Review: Building a Story Brand

Yes, I know I’m late to the party on this one. I finally got around to reading Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller, which was published in 2017 and has become a best-selling business book.

Storytelling has been emphasized over the past few years as the best way to effectively communicate the issue your customer is facing and how your solution will make them and their companies more successful. I’ve read a lot about storytelling in marketing, and I’m sure you have too, but Mr. Miller’s explanation resonated with me more than others I’ve read.

In Building a Story Brand, the author lays out a clear seven-step framework:

The hero (your customer) – has a challenge – meets a guide (you) – who provides a plan or solution – calls the hero to action, and ends the story with one of two types of success: achievement of an outcome or mitigating a downside risk.

It’s fun (at least to me) to look at commercials and see how many of the elements they hit, or if they bother to hit any at all. That’s where the difference between a story and pure entertainment comes in.

Take beer commercials for instance: Certain brands are so ubiquitous that they seem to provide only entertainment and frequency to remind people they exist. Remember Spuds McKenzie? However, it’s interesting to look at Modelo, now the best-selling beer in the U.S., and their advertising. They found a theme, people doing things their way and succeeding due to talent and hard work, that has struck a chord with both Hispanic and non-Hispanic customers.

It also helps that Modelo’s central theme of fighting upward is very different from any other advertising in the beer category. Their campaign began featuring actual people who fight, such as boxers. Recently they have evolved the campaign, replacing the tagline “brewed for those with a fighting spirit,” with the “the mark of a fighter”, and highlighting everyday people such as a tortilla-making abuela.

Turning to insurance, you’ve certainly seen plenty of Allstate commercials featuring Mayhem if you’ve watched any football. The commercials lean on the character so much that I think of the spots as almost all entertainment, although when I dissected them further I realized there are two levels of storytelling. Of course, there’s the story of Mayhem doing his thing. The second, underlying message is: You could easily be the person depicted who has her wedding ruined, or gets his car run into at the game. Allstate can “guide” you to a policy that provides you protection and by extension, peace of mind. It’s a short-hand version of the storytelling framework.

Building a Story Brand also caused me to reflect on how this relates to my own branding methodology, which I call Hexagonal Branding ^TM The two approaches turn out to be complementary to each other: The first three components of Hexagonal Branding lay the foundation for really understanding your customer and their needs, as well as the industry and competitive framework in which your company is operating. The storytelling aspect comes into play when you are framing positioning and messaging through development of The Brand Foundation, The Brand Language, and The Visual Brand.

In a B2B context, painting a picture of a company’s improved state as the result of your solution only goes so far. Inevitably, you’ll need proof, which in B2B usually involves case studies. Case studies can be challenging to obtain in industries such as healthcare, where the non-profit status and religious affiliations of many systems mean they can’t be perceived as endorsing a product. However, even a redacted case study is better than none.

Note: No Generative AI was harmed (or used) in the writing of this article.